


Growing up is a messy affair

by Tabata



Series: Leoverse [38]
Category: Glee
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-02-28
Updated: 2016-02-28
Packaged: 2018-05-23 19:32:55
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,433
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6127762
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Tabata/pseuds/Tabata
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Annie doesn't feel very well. Something is wrong with her, but she can't quite say what. Then a trip to the lake turns into a bloody mess.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Growing up is a messy affair

**Author's Note:**

> **WARNING:** This story is an AU from the original 'verse. What happens in here has little to none correlation with what happens in Leonard Karofsky-Hummel VS The world or Broken Heart Syndrome. The characters involved are (mostly) the same, but situations and relationships between them may be completely different.  
>  In this particular instance of the universe, Blaine is a man who used to live in Adelar, a small village that got ravaged and burned to ashes by plunderers years ago. He used to teach survival and fighting techniques to the kids there, but when the plunderers came he only managed to save a handful of them, and they escaped with only their lives.

Today Annie doesn't feel very well. She can't say what it is exactly that bothers her, she only knows that something is not right.

Normally, she's very calm, but today everything annoys her. What are usually just little things in the boys' behavior that she bears with, today are huge character flaws she cannot stand.  
Adam's constant need of correcting her whenever she does or says something he deems unladylike is infuriating, and she ends up cursing savagely in his face. Adam is so bewildered that he doesn't say a word. Blaine does, tho. And she gets more exercises to do as a punishment.

Leo too finds a way to be even more unbearable than usual. He's got the habit of complaining for everything, and since he's so _emotional_ – a pain in the ass, Annie would say – Blaine always ends up giving in to his whims one way or the other. She and Adam always pretend to ignore the fact that their teacher has a bit of a preference, it's not that big of a deal, really, they can do without, but today she just can't stand it. So, when Leo starts to show signs of one of his moods, she just shuts him up before he can ask for some special treatment or complain because something didn't really go the way he wanted it. Guess what? She's got the worst tummy ache in history, but she's still doing push ups, so he can very well do the same.

At the end of the day, the mood of the group is not exactly ideal, with Adam wondering what the heck is happening to her (and not being happy about it) and Leo being offended, so Blaine suggests them to go for a swim in the lake. “It will help you relax,” he says, intensely wishing for them to be gone for a while. “And it will help clear your mind.” 

In the summer, going to the waterfall after training is actually a bit of a ritual.  
They train very hard for hours every day and it's nice to plunge into that clear water, swim and play for a while before they have to come back, have dinner and go to sleep – Blaine is very strict on their daily routine.  
The boys starts running the moment they're given permission, turning it into a challenge between them. The first to get to the lake will get to dive from the big rock, which is the best place to do it. Annie doesn't feel like running or even going to the lake at all, but she took a vow a long time ago to always do everything the boys do, just to prove a point. 

Blaine has never considered her differently just because she's a girl – he expects her to train has hard as the boys do – but she sees the girls at the village and understands that this is not always the case. For some reason, girls are considered weaker and more stupid as far as weapons and fights are involved. One time, she was nine or ten, Blaine took the three of them with him to the village. He had something to do, so he let them free to roam the town with the other children while they waited for him.

They found a group of kids around their age and decided to see if they could join them. The village kids were still wary of them at the time because they lived in the forest and came from afar. The boys instantly took Adam and Leo with them, ignoring her completely. Nobody even thought of asking if she wanted to play cops and robbers or to go down at the river and catch frogs. They left her there with the other girls, who were just sitting there chatting and playing with their dolls. They were nice enough to invite her to join them, but the whole brush-the-doll's hair thing looked extremely boring to her. Actually, she was used to take her own doll, Pamela, along on quests through the woods with Adam and Leo, and Pamela didn't want to be brushed. She was adventurous and a bit scruffy like her, she wanted to live dangerously. So, Annie went after the boys and she had to face the biggest disappointment of her life when they turned her down _because she was a girl_. Later that night, after scolding Adam and Leo for siding with those stupid boys, she swore she was always going to do whatever she wanted, being that a boy thing or a girl thing, especially if they boys were doing it. And now, three years later, she still lives by that.

But today it's really harder than usual. For some reason, she feels tired and heavy, and she's aching all over. When she gets to the lake, Adam and Leo are already half naked and climbing the two rocks from which they usually dive. Apparently, Adam won. She watches them as they plunge into the water, Adam always graceful and Leo as the usual goofball, and she undresses. She only leaves her panties on, like the boys do. It has always been like that.   
“Are you coming or not?” Leo calls to her, waving his arm. “Are you tired?”

“I'm not tired!” She screams back. Her tummy ache is not cutting her any slack. If only she could throw up and be done with it!

She walks into the lake instead of diving in. The water is cold and not very pleasant. She swims to get to the boys, who are floating on their back in the middle of the lake. She joins them, until their heads touch, and they form a six-legged wheel that starts to rotate, moved by the stream. “What is wrong with you today?” It's Adam who breaks the ice. “You're weird.”

“Can we not talk about it?” Annie asks, pitifully.

“I agree,” Leo says.

“I just want to know,” Adam pouts a little. “You weren't very polite.”

Annie huffs. “I don't know, I don't feel very well today, okay? I'm sorry if I snapped at you.”

Leo looks back a little bit. He can't see any of them, but he tries anyway. “Are you coming down with the flu?” He asks.

Annie wishes they could just talk about something else. “No. I don't know. Can we talk about something else now? Please?”

They finally get it, and Leo informs them that his frog did something hilarious this morning, by jumping from his pocket directly into Blaine's mug. Annie hears Adam laugh, but she can't focus on what they're saying because a really bad cramp forces her to stop floating and curl in the water. Then she feels it, the most awful sensation as something comes out of her. It almost feels like a giant hand is squeezing her tummy. When she sees the first drops of blood coloring the water, she panics.

“Guys,” she says. And then, she realizes what she will have to tell them if they really pay attention. She doesn't want to explain to them where the blood is coming from. Something's really wrong with her. “Call Blaine!” She screams, as she swim towards the waterfall where she hopes the lather foaming on the water will cover the blood.

The boys turn around and see her swimming away. “Annie?”

“What's wrong?”

They follow her, of course they do, because they can never do what they're asked. She stands right under the waterfall, the water rumbling in her ears and splashing heavily on her head. She's freezing but she doesn't care. “Annie, are you alright?” Leo asks, trying to get closer. He can barely see her shape behind the wall of water.

“Don't get any closer!” She screams over the deafening roar of the water.

“What's going on?” Adam insists, worried. “Are you hurt? Did a snake bite you?”

“Are there snakes in this lake?!” Leo asks, a pang of terror in his voice.

“I don't know,” Adam shrugs. “Maybe? Annie, come out. Please. Tell us what's wrong.”

“Just call Blaine!” At that point, she's freaking out. “Please! Call him!”

They hear the way her voice shakes in terror and they panic too as a result. For a moment, they wonder if one of them should stay with her, but Annie starts screaming even louder. “Go away! Both of you! I just want Blaine!”

So they run, not even bothering to put pants on.

*

Blaine runs through the forest not knowing what he's going to find once he gets to the waterfall. He was at home, sitting in his favorite armchair, enjoying a glass of good wine and a moment for himself – sometimes having three kids in the house is overwhelming, especially when they spend half of their time fighting with each other and the other half seeking his attention – when Leo and Adam barged in into the house, slamming the door open, and started speaking all at once. They looked in a panic, they were fretting and flailing their arms, and most of all they were drenched and wearing only their underpants, which made the whole situation both hilarious and worrying. 

What he made out of their confused rambling is that something happened to Annie. They spoke about her being sick and venomous snake bites, but when he asked them if she fainted, they said no, that she was hiding behind the waterfall, screaming at them to bring him over. Blaine told the boys to stay put in the house and ran towards the lake.

When he gets there, everything's calm – he didn't know what he was expecting, but somehow he was imagining some kind of turmoil – and Annie is nowhere to be found. The surface of the lake is undisturbed. “Annie?” He calls, looking around. “Annie, it's me.”

Only then she comes out from under a tree. “Are the boys here?” She asks, hesitantly.

“No. What happened? Are you hurt?” Blaine gets closer and looks at her.

She looks mortified. “I don't know,” she murmurs.

She's shivering badly and her wet hair is not helping. Blaine hugs her and tries to warm her a little by rubbing her arms. “The boys said you were bitten by an animal,” he urges her. “Did you see what it was? What do you feel?”

She shakes her head. “It wasn't an animal,” she says. “It's me. Something is wrong with me.”

Blaine looks down at her. “What do you mean?”

“I'm bleeding.”

Blaine's confused. He looks her over once again, but he doesn't see any wound. “Where? How did it happen?”

She hiccups. “It's inside,” she finally says. “I'm peeing blood.”

Blaine's brain finally clicks, and it's both a relief and the most dreadful feeling in the world. She's not wounded and she's not going to die – that's the good news – but he will have to explain to her why she won't – and that's a little less good news.

He sighs. “You are okay,” he starts, thinking that reassuring her is the priority here. “You're not wounded or sick.”

“How can this be normal?!” She screeches, hysterically. “I'm losing blood.”

“Yes, this will need a little more time,” Blaine sighs again. When he took the kids in, he knew this moment was going to come for him and Annie. For the first years of her life he just told himself it was too early. Then, a couple of years ago he just started to ignore the fact that it was going to happen sooner or later. And if now she's here, shaking, wet and scared to death, that's all Blaine's fault. “Come over here, I need to talk to you.”

He tries to keep it simple, to explain the facts as he would explain anything else. She's a girl and that's how her body works, so there is absolutely nothing to be scared or embarrassed about. Her period is the way her body prepares to have a baby – even when it's not going to happen – and the bleeding is the evidence that those preparations were useless, so to speak. And of course she asks what makes them useless, and so he has to explain for the first time in his life how babies are born, which turns out to be easier than he thought it would be once he realizes that she desperately needs to understand what's going on with her. Facing that kind of need, he just can't be embarrassed on any level. The more he says, though, the more she looks kinda disgusted. He guesses it's better than horrified, right?

“Do you have any questions?” He asks, at the end of this half hour long explanation. They're sitting on the lake shore and lazily throwing pebbles in the water.

She stays silent for the longest time, and Blaine lets her. He doesn't want to urge her. It's okay even if she doesn't want to ask anything right away. She probably needs to take it all in first. But then, she frowns. “Is this the reason why they say girls can't do what boys do?” She asks, turning so red that her cheeks match her fiery hair. “It's because we bleed once a month?”

“What? No!” He frowns too. “Who told you that?”

“The boys at the village,” she answers, thinking back about that day of three years ago, but also about some more recent encounters with them. “They say girls can't fight or climb trees. Does this mean I can't anymore?”

Blaine chuckles, careful to make sure that it's clear he's not laughing at her. “No, you will only have to deal with your period, that's all. It won't stop you from doing what you want to do, and I certainly won't stop training you because of that,” he says, smiling. “It's a big change, but it only means you're growing up.”

“Hm.” She looks back at the water. “It's a bit unfair though, isn't it? The boys won't have to worry for something so gross and annoying.”

“They will have other problems,” Blaine sighs. “Maybe not as annoying as yours, but still. Growing up is a messy affair for everybody.”

Annie nods and rests his head against his shoulder. “Will you explain everything to them too?”

He hesitates. “I'm afraid I have to,” he says.

“Can I be there?” She asks, looking at him with an impish smirk. “I want to see their faces when you tell them the babies part.” She laughs and Blaine laughs too. If he knows his boys – and he does – their reaction is going to be priceless.


End file.
